What would be the fastest way for the government to inject money into the economy?

Could it possibly be to not take the money away from us in the first place?

Tax cuts are the fastest way to get money into the economy. Anybody who tells you different is a) an economist, b) lying to you, and/or c) lying to you because they want to take your money to buy your vote by giving some of it back to you. Don't fall for it.

This list has been stolen from Jimmy Moore, the Livin' La Vida Low Carb guy (whose link makes it a 51 Low Carb Blogs list).

1. HEALTHY FELLOW
2. DIABETES HEALTH TALK
3. GO HEALTHY GO FIT
4. HANNAH SUTTER
5. WORKOUT OR DIE TRYING
6. THE BODY TRANSFORMER
7. REAL FOOD AND MORE
8. KATE HARDING’S SHAPELY PROSE
9. TOTAL JENN MAKEOVER
10. SUSAN ALLPORT
11. A DIET EVOLUTION
12. MEATYOGI’S WEBLOG
13. FIT AND HEALTHY
14. WEIGHTY MATTERS AND STRAIGHT TALK
15. FAT FREE MIND
16. BALANCED EATING AND EXERCISE
17. BIG EASY ON LOW-CARB
18. LOW-CARB INFO AND RECIPES FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS
19. THE LOWCARBIST
20. THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF REV. HAGGISMACJEDI
21. POLAR BEAR DESCENDING
22. THAT HEALTH RULES
23. LOW-CARB SOUTH AFRICA
24. LASER ROCKET ARM
25. THE CYCLE BROKEN
26. RANDOM THOUGHTS AND TWISTED THREADS
27. LITTLE BY LITTLE
28. MOM2DM
29. THEORY TO PRACTICE
30. SON OF GROK
31. GETTING A LIFE
32. NUTURING HOPE
33. KELLY THE KITCHEN KOP
34. CHEESESLAVE
35. IMPACK FITNESS
36. MY DAILY WELLNESS TIP
37. STAN HERETIC
38. ANDY’S BLOG
39. LYNN’S LOW-CARB LIFESTYLE
40. VADIM’S UNIVERSE
41. ERIKA’S LOW-CARB MENUS
42. SYBILIZED LIVING MENUS
43. NEWVISION’S TIME CAPSULE
44. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A LOW CARBER
45. THE CARDIO-FREE ZONE
46. DIABETES TOO
47. THE WOWEE ZOWEE MENU BLOG
48. FOOD BLOG S’COOL
49. DAWN’S DREAM
50. WHAT SARA EATS

I got me some reading to do.

Via the fabius maximus blog, a quote from Roger Pielke, Jr.:

Peer review is simply a cursory check on the plausibility of a study. It is not a rigorous replication and it is certainly not a stamp of correctness of results. Many studies get far more rigorous peer review on blogs after publication than in journals. I use our ownblog for the purpose of getting good review before publication for some of my work now, because the review on blogs is often far better and more rigorous than from journals. This is not an indictment of peer review or journals, just an open-eyed recognition of the realities.

Emphasis mine. Remember this when somebody throws the buzz-word "peer-reviewed" in with the equally specious buzzword "consensus" when talking about questions of science.

Our Kremulakian Overlords. Another in a series of brilliant missives from the ever-impish Iowahawk:

When our scientist first discovered your planet 6.3 Kremulakian moon-orbits ago, I argued before the High Admiralty that it would be a suitable world for conquest and colonization. The Inner Council accused me of madness! They said we Kremulaks could never survive in your stupid planet's hostile hot temperatures. They said our nostrils would mutate and explode under your intense atmospheric pressures. They said that Hu-mans would never vote us into their control councils.

Fools! I wagered Supreme Overlord Gromfnorg-0 himself that not only would I survive, but that I would win quick election to your Earth Commerce and Energy committee -- without even using my visual cloaking device! Little did he know that I, Lord Waxulon-6, had been carefully monitoring your Earth-frequencies and Earth-internet and Earth-basic cable news, and had discovered the outpost which you Hu-Mans call "San Francisco." Needless to say, my little bet has paid off handsomely -- winning me over 6000 Kremulakian trading crystals.

Victory over you puny race was even easier than I anticipated. In fact, the only resistance I encountered was on the invasion-saucer voyage, when Pelosicon-8 and Obamulak-3 kept trying to recalibrate the music-frequencies. And the impudent weak-glanded Algor-11, who needed to make biowaste stops at every refueling station between here and the Antares subcluster.

I laugh, because otherwise I'd cry. Or rant.

I interrupt this cruise, somewhere out in the sunshine of the Eastern Pacific Ocean, to get a few things off my chest:

All Hail Obama. Hope, change, a new beginning.

If you buy the rhetoric, we are on the dawn of a new Golden Age, where everyone will have a good job, high-quality medical care, limitless renewable energy, freedom from random wiretaps or roving bands of waterboarding Republicans, a Constitutional right to publicly demonstrate in favor of war criminals and avowed intended mass-murderers to be, a full, healthy, low-fat vegetarian stew in every pot, and a puppy. Well, maybe not a puppy, because that would be speciesist slavery. Maybe one of those Japanese dog-robots (a Green one, of course.)

We are told that it's mandatory to tolerate a religion that is at its core fundamentally intolerant, but forbidden to tolerate in public places a religion that teaches as a core value the act of forgiveness.

We believe that it is just, right, and proper for the government to command that banks lend money to people who do not have the ability to repay those loans, and we also insist that when this scheme collapses, that it's a "failure of capitalism," not a failure of government. Because we believe, a priori, that government does not, can not fail at what it does.

We believe that the way out of an economic crisis brought on by too much debt is to spend more money.

Does any of this really make sense to anyone?

It gets better.

The political party holding the reins of all parts of the Federal Government for the next two years came in promising to be "the most ethical" government in history, but is so ridden by scandal at all levels--even before it takes full power--that newspapers don't even bother telling which party the crooked politicians belong to.

We have tax crooks writing tax laws. We have other tax crooks being appointed to the position which will enforce those laws.

We believe that because agenda-driven, government-financed scientists say that because of carbon dioxide, the Earth is getting warmer, (despite the documented flaws in their computer models, the limitations in modeling such a huge, chaotic, complex system using digital computers, and in contradiction to the plain evidence), we should take our already-teetering economy and completely destroy it, advancing into a Brave New World where Americans and Europeans will live like Indians and Chinese, except more so.

On a note of particular and personal interest to your humble writer: dieticians and nutritionists overwhelmingly believe, contrary to everything that's known about human biochemistry, that low-fat diets are superior for most humans to low-carbohydrate diets. Once again, the academia-media-government complex has promoted bad science, bad health, and bad policy because of narrow political agendas rather than any true sense of what is right and true.

Our entire society is a long, long, long way from sanity. We have constructed so many intellectual and legal houses of cards that the miracle is not that things are falling apart, it's that things have stayed together for so long.

What we're seeing is an entire civilization suffering a massive Tragedy of the Commons. In fact, that's a pretty good analogy of what all socialist schemes boil down to--everything is a "common good" that everyone has a "right" to, creating an unsustainable demand for pretty much everything. Then you tie that to the inevitable government interventions in the economy, which are ALWAYS destructive of wealth. Always.

Always.

At its best, government takes wealth from productive persons, takes a cut off the top, and distributes some portion of the remainder according to political requirements--not economic requirements, not humanitarian requirements, not "social-justice" requirements. Political requirements--as in paying off the people who keep you in power. Period.

That is exactly why free market economies perform better, make more people more wealthy, utilize resources better, are cleaner and "greener" than government-controlled economies. Always have been, always will be.

Does anybody study history any more?

Socialism. Worked so well everywhere else it’s been tried, eh?

If you want to tear down the achievers in society, then socialism is for you. If you want to improve, in absolute and in relative terms, the lot of the common man, then freedom and economic liberty are the only games in town.

From White Coat Underground, apparently a doctors' blog:

In the mid 20th century, when antibiotics were invented, strains of Staph resistant to penicillins rapidly evolved.

Time for an aside: “Evolved”, as in “evolution”. I know that very few of my readers are likely to be creationists, but this is one of the reasons creationism/intelligent design is so dangerous. Knowledge of evolutionary biology allows the prediction of antibiotic resistance. Creationism does not–its teleological arguments simply posit that God created resistant bacteria because He knew ahead of time about penicillin (or some such nonsense). ID has no predictive value, and is therefore worthless. End of digression.

Emphasis mine.

Gather the kids and Grandma, turn off the TV, and partake of the utter Dave Barryness of the

Dave Barry's 2009 Year In Review. A taste:

December

The CEOs of the Increasingly Small Three automakers return to Washington to resume pleading for a bailout, this time telling Congress that if they can reach an agreement that day, they will throw in the undercoating, the satellite-radio package and a set of floor mats. "We're actually losing money on this deal!" they assure Congress. Finally, they reach a multibillion-dollar deal under which the car companies will continue to provide jobs, medical care and pension benefits, but will cease producing actual cars. The restructured operation will be overseen by the federal government, using its legendary skill at keeping things on budget.

Showing the intellectual nimbleness we've all come to know and love about the Federal Government, the FDA has roused itself from its duty to keep Americans Safe From Ourselves to give their stamp of approval to a highly processed form of a natural non-sugar sweetener that you probably never heard of if you aren't plugged into the low-carb lifestyle: stevia.

Wall Street Journal:

The FDA's decision applies only to a highly purified form of stevia known as rebaudioside A, supplied by other companies to Cargill and Merisant, which have further developed it for tabletop, food and beverage use.

The view this morning from the back deck of the Palatial Abode

Microbiologist Tests Safety Of Spiked Eggnog, from ScienceDaily:

The experiment, which was done by Rockefeller University professor Vincent A. Fischetti at the request of National Public Radio’s Science Friday program, compared the bacteria found in homemade alcoholic eggnog with those found in store-bought nonalcoholic nog. After culturing samples of both solutions and incubating them for 24 hours at 37 degrees Celsius — body temperature — Fischetti and his colleagues found that while the store-bought product was teeming with a range of bacteria, the homemade version was completely sterile.

So there!